


Teacher

by Seika



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Ancient Greek only if you're feeling particularly generous, Latin, Philology, This pretends to sophistication while making crude anatomical puns, a very light garnish of Old Norse, on reflection that just makes it more Latin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-08 23:45:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6880423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seika/pseuds/Seika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a very pompous Earthling(?) says things to the Doctor both obvious and unimportant; or, a self-indulgent linguistic mess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teacher

Shall I tell you about the word "Doctor", Doctor? As we of Earth know it, as we of the English tongue know it, as we _think_ we know it.

A doctor now is a practitioner of medicine. More important than a nurse, at least - and damned if the qualified doctors won't let all the nurses know, and any other poor fool who gets it wrong - but they must tell us because we _don't_ know. Because we call them all doctors, spreading that wide and feeble umbrella out to catch a million little drops of rain. "I have to go in to have the Doctor operate on my heart in a week's time." "I think I have to go see my Doctor. This bloody cold just won't shift."  Generic, without worth or power; a _brand-name_ used without care for the inventor who first made it possible. The man of science, overwhelmed by the tides of sordid commerce: there's a parable for you.

Where, then, is the  _root_? Whence did the Doctor spring? As with most things, from the Big Bang, naturally. And in the primordial soup of life, in the twist of genes which began to give the brains of some benighted monkeys a centre for language, in the lost stutterings of the faceless, fantasised blob that were the Indo-Europeans. -- But, more proximately and relevantly, it comes to us from the Latin. doceo, docere, docui, doctum in the verb's principal parts: I learn, to learn, I learnt, for learning; first person singular present active indicative, present active infinitive, first person singular perfect active indicative, supine. A span of time and meaning crossed in four concise, Romantic, words. (Or eight ugly, Germanic ones). And, thus, the noun so formed: doc _tor_. The one who teaches. The instructor. The professor.

You're a liberal, of course. More aged than nations, more ancient than the language I'm giving you this lecture on - and, to be so, you must be ever- _new_. Tempus omnium edax est, but it breaks its teeth on you. And in your newborn innocence, you will say "Well, that might be its root, but look at what's grown up from that! A tree: trunk, branches, and leaves offering all their shades of meaning to the tired traveller. Let the roots lie in the cold and the dark. Let us hide away their ugliness; let us celebrate life and beauty and the beauty of life."

But the roots in the ground fix that tree there: without them, it would topple. Up from those roots, the tree draws water: without them, it would wither. Keep the dragon from your tree's roots, Fjölsviðr, ne nouem mundi ruant. edax et radix, and may they never meet.

The old Doctor, of course, still has a bit of a foothold, crumbling and tired as it may be: in the universities. That final degree, the doctor philosophiae, when one at last has the qualification to _teach_. Never mind, of course, that not one in a hundred teachers today is actually of that calibre. Let the not-teachers teach the not-learners: they are well enough matched, are they not?

  
And, always one step behind the doctor, always yearning for the final accolade, is the magister artium. Ars - a word very nearly rude. A trick, a technique, an _artifice_. Magister: not a doctor to students who love wisdom, but one worth less. One entrusted only with children, with the pretense of understanding; he does not control them solely because he teaches, because of his pupil's respect for his learning or for the subject itself, but because he is given power over them to keep them in line. A ruler by force. A master.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at 5am the day of an exam, and gave it only a cursory revision pass. If you're not me, it may be either wholly incomprehensible or utterly banal. I admit to being interested in _which_ of the two it is.


End file.
